Women against Romance

D espite the apparent submergence and eclipse of feminist Critical realism by the sentimentalist heroine’s text after the first two decades of the eighteenth century, an anti-romance undercurrent continued to circulate in the English women’s literary tradition throughout the century. While women have long been popularly associated with the romance, both as writers and readers, the female anti-romance tradition that I trace in this chapter suggests that the anti-romance was at least as important in women’s literary culture as the romance. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.